One Year Later: Alex Barton

It was a year ago that then 5-year-old Alex Barton was voted out of his Florida kindergarten class by his classmates, as directed to by their teacher, Wendy Portillo. Portillo first had the students say what they did not like about Alex after which they voted "Survivor-style" about whether he could stay in the classroom. Alex was "voted out": The incident sparked national, and international, attention and Portillo was suspended for a year without pay and lost her tenure. Earlier this year, Portillo appealed the ruling, which was upheld.

Portillo's having her students "vote out" Alex has continued to haunt Morningside Elementary School. Yesterday's Palm Beach Post notes that "Morningside faculty and administrators still aren't allowed to talk about the Alex Barton vote because of pending legal action"; some parents feel that "their school has been unfairly and unjustly tarnished over the past year." Certainly there was a great deal of media attention focused on the school in the wake of the May 2008 incident. But has anything been done at the school and in the school district to prevent something like what happened to Alex from happening again to another child on the spectrum; from any child, period?

Another article in the Palm Beach Post considers whether, one year later, things are better for students with autism. One parent, Phyllis Musumeci----who "became a national autism advocate after her autistic son was physically restrained 89 times while attending a Palm Beach County school"---has tried to change laws about seclusion and restraints, without results, and even suggests that things have gotten worse, not better. According to Jack Scott, director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Florida Atlantic University, the incident created "some awareness," but---from reviewing responses to online coverage of what happened at Morningside Elementary school as year ago---"there are still many people who mistakenly believe autism is a behavioral issue that can be corrected with disciplinary methods."

And that is a huge misunderstanding about autism and about how to teach children who are on the autism spectrum. One hopes that, at the very least, the teachers in the school that Alex used to attend have learned something about teaching students on the spectrum---and it's not clear that anyone has.